Letting Go Emotionally

By Deepak Chopra

Emotions are more stubborn than thoughts. The glue that holds you fast to your beliefs and expectations is emotion. Whenever you tell yourself that you can't let go, you are making an emotional statement.

In reality you can let go of any situation any time. "I can't" really means, "I fear the emotional consequences if I do." Your ego draws a line in the sand and insists that you will not survive the inner feelings that will arise if the line is crossed. A powerful limitation is being self-imposed here, and at the bottom it isn't true. You will survive any emotion; indeed, whatever you consider to be too much fear, too much loss, too much humiliation, too much disapproval, too much rejection has already happened.

You have crossed the line many times, otherwise you wouldn't know where to draw it. What your ego is really saying is that you can't cross the line again. From spirit's point of view, however, you don't have to.

There is a law in the unconscious that whatever you avoid will come back, and the more you avoid it, the stronger its return. Painful emotions don't come back for external reasons. They return because they are part of you; you created them before pushing them away. Every emotion you experience is yours.

We all make the mistake of believing that something "out there" makes us afraid, angry, depressed, anxious, and so on. In truth events "out there" are only triggers. The cause of every emotion is "in here," which means that inner work can heal it.

Adapted from The Path to Love, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1997). Acknowledged as one of the world's greatest leaders in the field of mind body medicine, Deepak Chopra, M.D. continues to transform our understanding of the meaning of health.